#839 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Art for sale, Serendipity1 Comment

Playing the parking lotto got me a big win yesterday. But I have to play against my better judgement. Normally I am an early bird shopper, but if I need to park in the old part of the city the parking charges work against me. Arrival before 9 pm and the meters are still on the overnight tariff. Rather expensive. Arrive soon after 9, and everyone is in a parking mood. The best plan is to arrive mid-morning after the first wave of early birds is done. I am an early bird, leaving things until mid-morning is not my thing.

Yesterday at 11 am I got a two hour, FREE, parking space next to the printers who were printing my C*****mas cards. Two hours free for a five minute job is a fabulous achievement. I was giddy with excitement. Even better I had done all the domestic admin prior to my arrival. What a gift.Time on my hands with no ticking meter. The sun was out and the dogs needed a walk.

Which took me to a Plymouth institution for lunch. Cap’n Jasper’s and their famous 1970’s smoked glass mugs.

The mugs disappeared for so long after Covid, I worried that they had been replaced forever by something less iconic. A twenty pence deposit is returned when you take the mug back. Albert gave me a look and the 20 pence was not returned to my pocket.

Tea finished.

And it was time for the main event. A bacon butty with fried onions.

An unexpected lunch out and still an hour of free parking left. I figured I could walk to my next planned destination, an art materials shop and the library. The sun was out, it was a bit of a walk, but both of the destination tasks were quick.

Back to the car with five minutes to spare…

The parking spot was only actually free for an hour. Who’s the idiot now.

But I had not been caught.

Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! * I chortled in my joy.

I had saved £3.60 and spent £20, 2 hours of unexpected pleasure in the sun. A lovely bit of old boat on the way.

And still some afternoon printing achieved.

* words of celebration from Jabberwocky by Lewis Carol.

#838 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Beach Life, Bobbing, Serendipity1 Comment
Firestone Bay in the sun at 5 pm.

No late blogging today. Obviously for regular readers there is a clue to the repetitive nature of today’s blog. But as so often happens a ponder has emerged from the repetition that takes me off in an unexpected direction. There was a small pod of dolphins sleeping in the bay, roughly where the sea changes colour. Every now and then a dolphin broke the surface of the water. Sunshine and water, why wouldn’t I share the news with all my swimming friends. I put this image on our Bobbers Whatsapp group. A bobber then replied with this image, of where she is currently dipping her toes.

© Angela Bobber

What an uplifting pair of pictures. A visual call and response.

The minute I typed, call and response I thought I should check my thinking.

This kind of visual call and response happens a lot on the Bobbers WhatsApp group. Tranquility Bay is our ‘home’ but if a bobber dips into other waters and gets a great photo then a picture pops up for everyone to enjoy. Nearly always with a comment that a swim at Tranquillity Bay will be much appreciated when the bobber returns from their glossy holiday bobbing.

Funny that I would use a shanty term to describe photographs of the sea. It must be the ebb and flow, the rhythm of  flisvos*

Meanwhile the sun is rising and I must be up and about and printing.

*

#837 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Art for sale, SerendipityLeave a comment

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?

I failed to write an early blog today, hopefully this apparent failure will set me up for later success, now, as I gather my words. Blogging at a snails pace I believe. There are many reasons I should have got my printing on the go more than a month before the exhibition opens. Today is a case in point. Real life still goes on, cars and vans need servicing and M.O.T’s. Life admin needs attending to and dogs need walking. Then the sun popped up in the studio and printing embellishment needed to be embellished.

Some embellishment is just a bit of type writing and a little bit of twinkle.

My mother would be ashamed,  she was a very accomplished typist. Speed and accuracy. I am slow and inaccurate. Good enough in the digital world of a laptop but truly I have sausage fingers on my old typewriter. Sometimes I forget the gap between words. Either a whole mistress piece goes in the bin or I have to hope that people are charmed by my typos.

#836 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity3 Comments

You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?

The sun was shining.

Just about everything in life feels more tolerable if the sun is shining. I was born in mid-November in the north of the Northern Hemisphere, so my first three months were spent being sun-deprived. Since that dreary start in life, I have been a gatherer or snatcher of sunshine moments. Two days ago sunshine at 5 pm was such a huge treat, I celebrated with an ice cream despite an outdoor temperature of 5 degrees. My dad was an enthusiastic gatherer of good weather. On mixed weather days, he was jubilant if he had achieved something in the sunny bits.

” Well” he would say, in a happy way. ” I think we have had the best of the day”

Subconsciously I must have adopted his way of thinking. Using sunshine moments wisely is a bit of an imperative, especially in the Winter months when they are in short supply. My early morning dog walk yesterday featured sunshine and a lifeboat.

The best of the day achieved early.

#835 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, pondering, Serendipity1 Comment

Yesterday bought me face to face with a very old ponder. When I was 16, in rural Essex, I discovered the joy of gathering in a pub on a Friday night with my friends. For a natter and a catch-up, before we headed off to the giddy excitement of rural or semi-rural nightclubs or live music events at the local college. Alcohol was not involved because public transport didn’t exist much beyond 8pm. We gathered at a pub called the Green Man. Sometimes we discussed men,mostly the real-world sort but occasionally and without Google or a vast library of reference books we pondered where all the Green Women were.

© WhatPub

Yesterday I started singing, with a community choir, a contemporary collection of songs called The Green Man. Composed not five minutes from my current home and inspired by the same landscape that inspired my Green Androdgyny

I have spent an extremely  small percentage of my life pondering the folklore of the Green Man. Puzzled that the human face of the arrival of spring is male. Last year I created an androdgynous Green person for a Spring exhibition. I have been down a green- man -google- rabbit- hole researching the whole Green Man tradition and am both older and wiser and yet not wiser. If there is a female version of the green man she is less well known, has a more awkward name and not surprisingly has a more active role in creating Spring. Sheela Na Gig is represented as a woman with disproportionately large genitals. Almost essential given that in other portrayals she is actually giving birth to trees and bushes that already have a full compliment of leaves and fruit. Splayed branches out first. Deeply uncomfortable with a high risk of tears, either meaning of the words and probably both at the same time.

I will leave this ponder right here…

The singing was fun. I may concentrate on that.

#834 theoldmortuary

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Bobbing, Serendipity1 Comment

March the Ist rewarded the Bobbers with a great swim yesterday morning. The sun came up. The water was at 10 degrees and the air temperature was 5 degrees. Nothing significantly different from January and February. But swimming on the first day of meteorological Spring felt buzzy. We were buzzy. As a group we have completed our third winter of regular sea swimming. When we started a photo like this was unthinkable. Each separate household kept themselves about two meters apart and our swim was our half hour of permissible outdoor exercise during a Covid lockdown.  Our group of 12 to 14 swimmers stretched out on the promenade for almost 20 metres depending on who lived with whom. Even sticking to the rules there was always a small element of anxiety about our early bobbing sessions. That anxiety was heightened when we were approached by the police.  We shouldn’t have worried, the police were concerned for our safety.  There was a voyeur on the loose. Hidden in clear sight, or in his case enhanced clear sight. A man was taking his half hour exercise by cycling along the promenade in fluorescent clothing. Fitness was not his goal however. He sought stimulation of an entirely different sort. His gimlet eyes searched for the hidden curves of damp bottoms or boobs as swimmers struggled in or out of their clothes.

Another winter was marked by an Atlantic Seal called Spearmint who joined the swimmers of Firestone Bay rather too enthusiastically for her own good.

She swam with us so often she almost needed her own Bobbers sweatshirt.

Maybe that’s the reason this year’s winter swimming has felt, at times, like a chore.  The only memorable thinge is how much storms have negatively affected our Bobbing plans.

Winter 21/22 Year of the Perv

Winter 22/23 Year of the Seal

Winter 23/24 Year of the Storms

I painted Storm Agnes, the first one of the season. She really whipped into Firestone Bay with a malign fury. The others didn’t inspire me quite so much. No paintings.

Storm Agnes in Tranquility Bay. Private Collection © theoldmirtuary

No more winter swims for 9 months, how fabulous.

#833 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, Art for sale3 Comments
Gelli print, direct print and watercolour.

Do you believe in fate/destiny?

March is here. My fate or destiny for the day is set. The first sea swim of the new month awaits. I have spent the week mistressing* a new printing technique. Gelli printing. My shoulders are tight from concentration and need the morning swim. I wouldn’t be in this tight time constraint with tight shoulders if I had used the last 18 months wisely. I hadn’t printed since Art School when I planned and curated a print exhibition in a local gallery.  In the summer of 2022. The printers I worked with were inspirational and I vowed to take up printing, to be well prepared when the next exhibition happened. I am rubbish at long deadlines. A sensible woman would have done printing courses. Not me! I did a watercolour course and fell back in love with the serendipity and subtlety of pigment in water. I do have a print course booked in two weeks, exactly one week before the exhibition. Meanwhile I am trying to invent a method that involves printing and watercolour. Madness.

This morning a swimming friend sent me the video at the end of the blog. Oh dear!!! My tight shoulders got an early work out as I chuckled and was appalled. I have used those smug phrases.

” I swim all year actually “

Even worse for me, in a distant life I moved from London to Brighton

” Well, Hove, actually” **

In other printing news, next year’s Christmas cards are with the printers. Last use of the C word until the other side of Autumn.

Happy St Davids Day, enjoy the vid.

* I like to rehabilitate the word ‘Mistress’ from its philandering connotations. I don’t need to master anything I am a woman trying to create a mistresspiece.

** ‘Hove actually’ is another, possibly smug, statement known to all who live or have lived on the South Coast.

theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity2 Comments

Do you enjoy your job?

I’ve always enjoyed my jobs. The art one of the last few years does not bring with it a reliable income but that is the only downside. The job that brought a reliable income had a few more downsides. But both have been enriching experiences. Before my ‘proper’ job I worked from the age of 14-20 in a series of low paid, part-time jobs that could be fitted around education. Nostalgia and the elixir of youth make those jobs and time with minimal responsibility seem like the twinkly moments of employment. I fitted so much variety into those six years. Always at the bottom of the pile of employees, the ‘Saturday’ girls or boys got all the dreadful jobs on any day of the week.

Menial jobs were good for me. I find it easy to spot people who have never done minimum-wage jobs. Just as privileged people who have never been in that position can probably ‘spot’ me. Finding pleasure, and enjoyment, even in the tough, and at times gritty, low-paid jobs was a great lesson to learn.

#831 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, SerendipityLeave a comment

This morning I had to hunt for an old sketch to send to a friend. The easy solution was to look in my Paintings/Art file of digital images.

This file is 10 years old in 2024, I am hopeless at keeping this archive up to date. This morning I put the two most recent paintings into the file. I also had a little scroll through an imperfect record of my creative output of the last ten years.

Once again I have mentally promised myself to be more diligent with my archiving over the next 10 years.And for now I must be more diligent in actually producing some actual art. Less pondering, more art .